Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 12.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 20:20:48 +0100
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@mulberrytech.com>
Subject: dissertation on online collaboration
Readers of HUMANIST may be interested in the following (from Steve
Talbott's NETFUTURE):
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User-specified Tools for Online Collaboration
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NetFuture reader Aldo de Moor has completed a Ph.D. dissertation that some
of you may be interested in. Here are a few sentences from the preface:
All over the world, forests are disappearing at an alarming rate. I
usd to be quite involved in several forest conservation campaigns.
However, while working on these issues, it became increasingly clear to
me that there are no simple solutions for dealing with this very urgent
problem. The only way to address complex issues like this is to
involve many people, who represent a wide range of stakeholders, in a
continuous dialogue.
....time and again we found out how difficult it is to keep prolonged
and intensive computer-enabled collaboration going. People would start
to work together enthusiastically, but somehow, results failed to
materialize, after which participation would wane quickly. This
despite common goals and considerable initial efforts of the
participants, and despite the fact that when the same networks of
professionals meet physically, collaboration is often successful
indeed. While investigating these failures, I found out that the
problems encountered are not particular to our network. In fact,
similar breakdowns are reported in a wide body of literature on
computer supported cooperative work.
In working on this problem, de Moor produced "a theory of legitimate user-
driven specification, as well as a supporting method and [software] tool.
They should enable members of virtual professional communities to use
their potential for collaboration to create network information systems
that better meet the communal needs".
De Moor wrote his thesis at Tilburg University in The Netherlands, and
summaries of it in English and Dutch, as well as information for obtaining
English copies of the entire thesis, are available at
http://infolab.kub.nl/people/ademoor/phd .
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Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
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